Be concerned all you want, but look at it this way: without the most populous nations (for instance, the USA) at the top of a list like this politicians can downplay the seriousness of the threat. HN has a small army of people who do nothing else than trying to make it seem like this is 'just a flu', or something slightly worse.

All of that taken together translates into people simply ignoring the danger and continuing their life making things much worse in the long run.

Viruses don't have legs, they need people to transport them. And as long as we're willing it gets spread around and some people will die. If rankings like these send the message loud and clear that this also concerns you then I'm all for the rankings, even if they are a bs statistic without taking into account the total population size. People find it much easier to relate to 5000 people dead than they do to 2000 people per million infected.

Agreed that we need to spread the message far and wide. Just slamming down on people that are doing their best to cope with this situation isn't very productive, if not discouraging and harmful. In these times, Solidarity is needed. Just the way we support Italian crisis, we need to do the same to the US and the rest of the countries.

Slam governments, take it up on the streets to address issues after this pandemic is over.

> without the most populous nations (for instance, the USA) at the top of a list like this politicians can downplay the seriousness of the threat

That doesn't make any sense. First, it's not desirable in any way for the US to be near the top of that list. That's a per capita list (for obvious reasons it's better for small nations to dominate that list) and the US has a spread out and very low population density compared to most nations in eg Europe. Having a high population nation doesn't inherently correlate to being near the top of the per capita infection list.

Population density is not your friend when it comes to a highly infectious virus spreading in the population.

Countries in Europe vs the US on population density:

The Netherlands 12x, Belgium 11x, UK 9x, Germany 7x, Switzerland 6x, Italy 6x, France 4x, Poland 4x, Spain 3x.

The US also has no primate cities, whereas Europe has ~25 of them (hyper population concentration). Most nations in Europe have a primate city that dominates the nation in terms of population, acting as a massive potential infection supercenter.

It's entirely unsurprising that smaller European nations with high population densities vs the US would have higher infection rates per capita.

These rankings are important because it helps us get a feel for what type of quarantine action is getting the virus under control.

Any country with sufficient testing that's managed to bring the growth rate below exponential is worth an enormous amount of attention, because we seem to have many countries who have taken action yet failed to stop exponential growth.

Then use cases/capita. US has 330 million people and comparing it with #2 spot (Italy with 60 million) is completely insane, not to mention that the worse is yet to come to US.

I am all for taking a critical look at American systems and their effectiveness of the response, but the ranking by the case numbers is naive, misleading and unproductive.

Every country starts with (let's say) 1 imported case. From there, it grows. Cases/capita doesn't really mean anything until you get into the millions of cases and start thinking about what the upper bound might be.

And so ranking countries by size of outbreak seems reasonable to me.

I edited my comment with some data. The onset is staggered, the entire ranking thing is useless until the pandemic is over. It is simply a tracker, not an objective measure of the efficacy or the effectiveness of the measures each country is taking. It is too soon.

I've seen plenty of graphs where people plot the epidemics correcting for start date in each country, that seems pretty useful.

Edit: Here you go, here's one corrected for day of 100th case.

https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1241149458089418752

This is nice but still has major confounding effects that could completely change the story:

- Amount of testing

- Sampling process of testing - i.e. Policies that govern whether someone should be tested or not. Each country has their own policy.

- Demographics, especially age

- Still shows total cases, should be cases/capita

- Some effects of weather/humidity

I agree except for cases/capita. I dont see how that is relevant during the initial phases of an epidemic, as explained above.

> we seem to have many countries who have taken action yet failed to stop exponential growth

Remember the virus has an incubation period of around 2 weeks. China's numbers appeared to be increasing exponentially for 2 weeks after the lockdown, but those were mostly people infected before the lockdown.

This list is meaningless unless you factor in the geographic sizes of the countries and what percentage of the land passes some density threshold.

If you split up the united states into regions, we definitely would not be 16th on the list.

You should rank in cases per test instead. Otherwise countries that simply don't test look very good.